Follower Friday: souffle-soul
Follower Fridays is a series of profiles highlighting members of Gaysian Third Space to showcase the diversity of gaysians in the Community. This week’s featured member is @souffle-soul
Hi! I’m Matt, and I use he/him/his. I’m 20 years old, Chinese-American, and so very gay (getting gayer every day). I think of myself as a jack of all trades; my hobbies include acapella, dance, makeup, nail painting, plushie making, cooking, baking, and more! I love trying new things, and I always try my best to be good at what I do.
I was born and raised in San Jose, California. I’m also temporarily based in New Jersey for school, but I’m planning on returning to the west coast after graduation; I’d like to end up close to the rest of my family, and the allure of good Asian food is also quite difficult to resist.
I’m currently studying Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. On campus, I’m active in an acapella group (VTone) and two dance groups (Triple 8 and Koko Pops), and I believe those all have videos public on Youtube, so you can check those out if you want. I’m also an LGBT peer educator on campus.
Over the summer I’m a software engineer intern at Facebook, so I’m back in the bay for the next few months. Looking forward to eating lots of good food and reconnecting with my friends!
What are you passionate about?
I would probably have to say that I’m really passionate about music. The exhilaration that I feel when jamming out to a great tune is indescribable, and when I get really busy, I like to take some time to relax by belting my favorite songs or dancing in an empty dance studio.
I’m also particularly passionate about deconstructing and destroying norms of toxic masculinity. I think that toxic masculinity is to some extent at the root of both sexism and anti-LGBTQ sentiment, and furthermore is also harmful to cishet men. At the moment, opposing toxic masculinity for me is expressing non-traditionally-masculine attributes and interests in everyday life, whether it be nails, makeup, or body language, which has made me much happier as a person. Though I’m not sure if things will improve in the short-term, I’m optimistic that over my lifetime our culture may become less strict about gendered expectations.
What is your dream job (real or fantasy)?
When I was young, I wanted to be a marine biologist, because I absolutely love all marine animals (especially the weird ones). I’d browse articles on Wikipedia, and daydream about scuba diving every day or exploring tide pools along the coast.
Now that I’m older, I’ve realized that I maybe don’t want to spend my days seasick, but a little part of me still thinks I could’ve made it work.
If you could change the world with one idea, what would it be?
I’d probably want to remind people that a little empathy can go a long way. There may be plenty of people who you can’t see eye to eye with, but I think that it’s still important to have empathy, to be forgiving where forgiveness is earned, and to understand that people have had different experiences than you have.
This is not to say that you should keep people who negatively impact your life or livelihood as acquaintances (you probably shouldn’t), but rather that you do not need to believe that someone lacks basic humanity in order to justifiably disagree with them.
